PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Brown University will present nine honorary degrees
at its 233rd Commencement Monday, May 28, 2001. The degrees will be
conferred during the University Convocation, which begins at approximately 11:30
a.m. on The College Green.

None of the recipients is a Commencement speaker. At Brown, that honor goes
to two members of the graduating class. This year, the speakers will be Ana
Escrogima of New York City and Joshua Levine of North Hollywood, Calif.

However, four honorary degree recipients will speak during Commencement
Weekend:

Small will present a Commencement Forum titled “A
21st-Century Smithsonian” at 9 a.m. Saturday, May 26, in Room
001 of the Salomon Center for Teaching, located on The College Green. His talk
is open to the public.

Eustis is on a Commencement Forum panel titled “An Encounter in Copenhagen” at 2:15 p.m. Saturday, May 26, in Room 101 of Salomon Center. With fellow panelists Thomas Biersteker, director of the Watson Institute for International Studies, and Leon Cooper, Nobel Prize-winning professor of physics, Eustis will discuss how they used Michael Frayn’s Tony-award-winning play “Copenhagen” to offer a new course at Brown this spring. The session is open to the public.

Marshall will present a Commencement Forum titled “Judicial
Independence: ‘A Mighty Invention’” at 2:15 p.m. Saturday, May
26, in Sayles Hall, located on The College Green. Her talk is open to the
public.

Albright will deliver the Baccalaureate address at approximately 1:30 p.m.
Sunday, May 27. For space reasons, only graduating seniors may attend the
service, which will be held in the First Baptist Church in America. However, the
service will be videocast to The College Green for parents and others to
view.

Editors: For more information about the lectures, or for detailed
biographical information and photographs of the candidates, please contact the
News Service at (401) 863-2476.

Between 1997 and 2001, Madeleine Korbel Albright was the 64th
secretary of state of the United States. She was the first woman to hold the job
and the highest-ranking woman in U.S. government history.

During her tenure, the United States led efforts to expand and modernize NATO
and its campaign to reverse ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, promoted peace in
Northern Ireland and the Middle East, worked with Russia and North Korea to
reduce nuclear dangers, and sought to enhance cooperation with China while
pressing for change in such areas as human rights. Albright also presided over a
historic restructuring of U.S. foreign affairs institutions to respond to
21st-century threats.

During the first Clinton administration, Albright was the U.S. permanent
representative to the United Nations and a member of the President’s
cabinet and National Security Council.

Since leaving government service, Albright has accepted an appointment as the first Michael and Virginia Mortara Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. She will also be a distinguished scholar at the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan Business School. Albright is chairman of the board of the National Democratic Institute, writing a book and pursuing a range of public policy activities.

Kofi Annan is the seventh secretary-general of the United Nations. The first
secretary-general to be elected from the ranks of United Nations staff, he began
his term Jan. 1, 1997.

Annan’s priorities as secretary-general have been to revitalize the
United Nations; to strengthen the organization’s traditional work for
peace and development; to encourage and advocate human rights, the rule of law
and the universal values of equality, tolerance and human dignity found in the
U.N. Charter; and to restore public confidence in the organization.

Annan joined the United Nations system in 1962 as an administrative and
budget officer with the World Health Organization. Since then he has served in a
variety of capacities. In 1990, following the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq, Annan
accepted a special assignment to facilitate the repatriation of more than 900
international staff and the release of Western hostages in Iraq. He subsequently
led the first United Nations team negotiating with Iraq on the sale of oil to
fund purchases of humanitarian aid.

He has also sought to improve the status ofwomen in the Secretariat
and build closer partnerships with groups whose strengths complement those of
the United Nations.

Sheila E. Blumstein, the Albert D. Mead Professor of Cognitive and Linguistic
Sciences, has served as Brown University’s interim president since Feb. 9,
2000, just 48 hours after President E. Gordon Gee’s announcement that he
would leave Brown for Vanderbilt University.

Blumstein, a highly respected specialist in the human production and
understanding of language and its neural bases, came to Brown in 1970 as
assistant professor of linguistics. She was promoted to associate professor in
1976 and became a full professor in 1981. She chaired the Department of
Linguistics from 1978 to 1981, and the Department of Cognitive and Linguistic
Sciences from 1986 to 1987, when she was named dean of the College. Although she
announced her retirement as dean effective July 1, 1994, Blumstein continued to
serve in that capacity until a successor was named in May 1995.

Late in 1997, Blumstein was asked to serve as interim provost. She agreed and
served from Jan. 6, 1998, through the end of the academic year, when she
returned to full-time teaching and research.

Blumstein has received numerous academic honors, including a Guggenheim
Fellowship and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Demetrios Christodoulou is considered by many to be the preeminent
contemporary thinker about Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

In September 1968, a month shy of his 17th birthday, Christodoulou
was admitted to Princeton’s graduate program in physics. His research
explored the thermodynamics of black holes, and he received his doctorate in
physics in June 1971.

He is credited with the discovery of what is now known as the Christodoulou
Memory Effect, discovered 70 years after Einstein’s theory was first
formulated. It states that there is a permanent change, a “memory,”
in the wave field from a gravitational wave burst. Another milestone is his work
on “naked” singularities. Singularities, or points of infinite
density that are formed when matter or field energy collapses, are hypothesized
to exist within black holes, from which nothing can escape. What Christodoulou
showed was that a “naked” singularity could exist outside of a black
hole.

Since 1971, Christodoulou has worked and taught at leading research centers
and universities. He was appointed professor of mathematics at Princeton in
1992, and since 1998 has been affiliated with Princeton’s physics
department as well.

He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including Guggenheim and
MacArthur fellowships.

Oskar Eustis is in his seventh season as artistic director at Trinity
Repertory Company in Providence.

This spring, Eustis directed Trinity Rep’s two-part Cider House
Rules, and previously directed the company’s productions of Julius
Caesar; Slavs!; Long Day’s Journey into Night; Voir Dire; Angels in
America, Part I: Millennium Approaches (for which he received the Elliot
Norton Award for Outstanding Director from the Boston Theatre Critics Circle);
Angels in America, Part II: Perestroika; Into the Woods; Ambition Facing
West; The Music Man; Nine Armenians; and As You Like It.

Eustis, who is a visiting associate professor of theater at Brown, has worked
as a director, dramaturg and artistic director for theaters around the world.
Between 1981 and 1986, he was resident director and dramaturg at the Eureka
Theatre Company in San Francisco, and in 1989 he became its artistic director.
While there, he commissioned Tony Kushner’s Angels in America.
Eustis directed its world première at the Mark Taper Forum in Los
Angeles, where he became associate artistic director in 1989. The Los Angeles
production received six Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Awards and eleven
Drama-Logue Awards.

Margaret H. Marshall is chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial
Court. First appointed a justice of the court in November 1996, she was named
chief justice in September 1999. She is the second woman to serve on the Supreme
Judicial Court and the first woman to serve as chief justice.

Born in South Africa, Marshall led several student organizations while an
undergraduate at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg. As president of the
20,000-member National Union of South African Students, Marshall helped lead
anti-apartheid activities and protests amid threatening government
opposition.

In 1968, she came to the United States to do graduate work. She earned a
master’s degree from Harvard University (1969) and a law degree from Yale
University (1976). While a graduate student at Harvard, she served as a
consultant to organizations and foundations concerned with ending apartheid.

Before being named vice president and general counsel of Harvard in 1992,
Marshall practiced law in several Boston firms, specializing in intellectual
property matters. Among her awards and honors is the American Bar
Association’s Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement Award, which
honors a female lawyer who has achieved professional excellence within her area
of specialty and has “actively paved the way to success for other women
lawyers.”

Lorrin A. Riggs, a mentor and teacher for 39 years to Brown University
undergraduates, graduate students and faculty colleagues, is legendary in the
field of visual science.

He is widely regarded as the developer of the stabilized image technique,
which was a critical step in revealing how the eye sees and how the brain
receives visual information. Experimenting on himself, Riggs devised an eyepiece
that stabilized the visual input to the eye. His research ultimately
demonstrated that if the image of the world were stopped from moving on the back
of the eye, everything disappears.

In addition, Riggs and his students conducted many of the seminal experiments
on recordings from the eye and the visual cortex. These techniques are now
routinely used to diagnose and follow diseases of the retina and visual
pathways.

Riggs began his academic career at Brown in 1938 as a research associate. He
moved through the ranks of the faculty, becoming a full professor in 1951, the
L. Herbert Ballou University Professor in 1960, and the Edgar J. Marston
Professor of Psychology in 1968. In 1977, he was named a professor
emeritus.

In the 1990s, Philip Roth won America’s four major literary awards in
succession: the National Book Critics Circle Award for Patrimony (1991),
the PEN/Faulkner Award for Operation Shylock (1993), the National Book
Award for Sabbath’s Theater (1995) and the Pulitzer Prize in
fiction for American Pastoral (1997). He won the Ambassador Book Award
for the English-Speaking Union for I Married a Communist (1998); in the
same year he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House.

Previously he won the National Book Critics Circle Award for The
Counterlife (1986) and the National Book Award for his first book,
Goodbye Columbus (1959). In 2000 he published The Human Stain,
concluding a trilogy that depicts the ideological ethos of postwar America. For
The Human Stain Roth received his second PEN/Faulkner Award as well as
Britain’s W.H. Smith Award for the Best Book of the Year.

This year he received the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and
Letters, the Gold Medal in fiction, given every six years “for the entire
work of the recipient.” His latest novel, TheDying Animal,
was published this month.

On Jan. 24, 2000, Lawrence M. Small became the 11th secretary of
the Smithsonian Institution after having served for nearly a decade as president
and chief operating officer of Fannie Mae, the world’s largest housing
finance company.

Before joining Fannie Mae, Small worked at Citicorp/Citibank, the largest
U.S. banking institution, for 27 years. His numerous posts within the firm
entailed work in the United States as well as abroad in such positions as senior
executive in charge of commercial banking, information technology, human
resources, and worldwide corporate banking. He ended his tenure there as vice
chairman and chairman of the Executive Committee of the Board of Directors.

Small has served on more than a dozen boards, committees and organizations
ranging from the Spanish Repertory Theatre in New York City to the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Council to Morehouse College, a historically black
institution in Atlanta. He also has served on the boards of trustees of the John
F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the National Gallery and the Woodrow
Wilson International Center for Scholars. In addition, he is a trustee
emeritus of Brown University, from which he graduated in 1963 with
highest honors in Spanish literature.